Think comprehensively and synergistically

We operate with a broad-spectrum perspective on both existential risks and the existential shifts needed to build a regenerative society. Understanding how different fields and initiatives interrelate and creating synergy between them is crucial.

Build a listening & learning network

We gather insights from networks of innovators, leaders, and subject matter experts, and align incentives appropriately across these groups to listen to weak signals, identify outliers, surface innovation, create experiments, learn, and implement initiatives.

Design for emergence

The path to innovation and transformation is rarely a straight line. There are rarely “right answers” that are known that simply must be implemented. Rather, we need to create containers where we can design in concert with the forces of serendipity, life, and evolution, pushing intelligence to the edges of a network, finding and nourishing “islands of coherence,” to allow new possibilities that were beyond our individual and collective imaginations to emerge.

Learn through experiments

We understand that the path to create high leverage change must emerge out of design and experimentation, leading to cycles of learning, which inform subsequent experiments. Harvesting learnings from each successive experiment is critical.

Create tools, technologies, and practices that can be replicated

One of the best ways to create leveraged change is to create new tools, technologies, and social infrastructure that can be replicated without further input of investment or grant money. This can be through supporting the creation of open source and public domain infrastructure, alongside traditional commercial enterprises.

Leverage multiple types of capital

Venture investment can be a powerful tool for initiating specific kinds of technological experimentation, though not all worthwhile new inventions are well suited for venture approaches. In some instances, grants, government funding, debt, crowdfunding, CDFIs, and in-kind donation of goods and services may be more appropriate. Matching critical innovations with the right type of capital is key to increasing their likelihood of success.

Tell a compelling story

Humans learn from each other, and humans learn through stories. Telling stories about new possibilities in a way that invites others into the new possibility creates change. Initiatives worth existing deserve world-class branding and storytelling, carried out across web, podcasts, social media, legacy media, documentaries. Media and research publications designed to influence other funds help amplify capital movement. Storytelling must be a core strategy in any theory of change.

Influence policy

The world we live in is profoundly shaped by market forces. Policy provides the framework for the market to operate within, and changes in policy enable, shape, compel, and constrain market forces. Much of the change that is needed will be aided by shaping policy to compel industry behavior toward sustainable and regenerative practices. To not understand or utilize this lever diminishes impact.

Catalyze human ecosystems

Large groups of people coordinating resources toward shared goals create societal change at scale. Ultimately, we aim to design social processes that transform sets of related initiatives into ecosystems of shared learning and experimentation. This enables the emergence of broader social movements aligned to creating a regenerative society.